BI in Healthcare: Lessons Every Industry Should Heed

BI in Healthcare: Lessons Every Industry Should Heed: "This month, Jill Dyche’s colleague, Shravan Miriyala, describes why the healthcare industry has learned some lessons from the rest of us. At the same time, recent healthcare BI efforts can remind us of some tried-and-true BI best practices."

SQL Server 2005 Best Practice Analyzer

SQL Server 2005 Best Practice Analyzer: "I've been testing the re-released Best Practice Analyzer for SQL2005 called SQL Server Best Practice Analyzer 2.0, available for download here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=da0531e4-e94c-4991-82fa-f0e3fbd05e63&displaylang=en

I find this tool to be very handy for identifying database Security & Performance issues and making fix recommendations, even though it is CTP and not final release yet.

It does NOT have to be installed on a remote server, just on a DBA's Mgmt Studio workstation. It DOES, however, require that you have Admin priviledges on the remote SQL Server in order to access the Windows registry."

Quick MS Access (JET SQL) to SQL Server (T-SQL) Cheatsheet

Quick MS Access (JET SQL) to SQL Server (T-SQL) Cheatsheet: "Lots of questions come up in the SQL Team forums about conversions between Access and T-SQL and some of the differences between the two SQL dialects. Here's a few handy things to help you out with converting your projects. Check in now and then as this short list will eventually grow as more things come up."

Survey: MySQL use rises 25 percent | News.blog | CNET News.com

Survey: MySQL use rises 25 percent News.blog CNET News.com: "Data released Thursday from an Evans Data Group survey of database usage among developers shows MySQL use increased from 32 percent in 2004 to 40 percent last year. The survey tallied real production use in corporate environments, not just tire-kicking or pilot projects, Evans spokesman Jon Broenen said. "

40,000 ASU Students Leap to Google Apps; University Pays Zero - Technology News by InformationWeek

40,000 ASU Students Leap to Google Apps; University Pays Zero - Technology News by InformationWeek: "'Providing e-mail to students alone cost us half-a-million dollars in expense every year,' says Sannier, 'not to mention the time of my staff to support it.'

Even more important, he says, is the pace of innovation: 'Now we're on Google's development curve, not ours.' "

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Using a RAM Disk with Analysis Services

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Using a RAM Disk with Analysis Services: "One topic that has come up occasionally over the years is whether there is any merit in using a RAM Disk with Analysis Services to improve performance. Certainly in the SQL Server world they seem to have some benefits (see for example Tony Rogerson's post here: http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/tonyrogerson/archive/2006/08/24/958.aspx) but as far as I know no-one has ever done any testing for Analysis Services so when I found myself with a bit of free time and a customer who might potentially benefit I thought I'd do so myself."

How to transfer terrabytes of data

Wired News: Google's Next-Gen of Sneakernet: "How do you get 120 terabytes of data -- the equivalent of 123,000 iPod shuffles (roughly 30 million songs) -- from A to B? For the most part, the old-fashioned way: via a sneakernet. It's not glamorous, but Google engineers hope to at least end the arduous process of transferring massive quantities of data -- which can literally take weeks to upload onto the internet -- with something affectionately called 'FedExNet' by the scientists who use it."

BI Strategy for Subscription-Oriented Business

BI Strategy for Subscription-Oriented Business: "Typical questions include:

What is the current pool of subscribers?
What parameters are contributing to the growth of this pool?
How to increase that pool by tuning all the contributing factors?
How many people are signing up everyday, and where do they come from?
How to reduce the attrition rate by knowing the reason people are canceling?
How to lower the billing failures by acting more proactively?
What is the most effective marketing strategy?
How to forecast future metrics based on historical data points? "

Oops! Technician's error wipes out data for state fund - CNN.com

As a DBA, do you test your backups? Restore them periodically, to make sure the media works, etc? Old veterans all have a horror story about what made them get the religion of testing backups (in my case, it was backups with very minor imperfections, that would cause single bits to flip in a data warehouse.)

Don't be this guy...

Oops! Technician's error wipes out data for state fund - CNN.com: "JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) -- Perhaps you've experienced that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing an account worth $38 billion.

That's what happened to a computer technician reformatting a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue. While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account -- one of Alaska residents' biggest perks -- and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well."

SimonS' SQL Server Stuff : Online Index White Paper

SimonS' SQL Server Stuff : Online Index White Paper: "Paul Randal recently informed me of a new white paper on online index operations. The whitepaper can be found here Online Index White Paper.
This is one of many whitepapers that have been published lately by Bob"

Finding Foreign Key Constraints in Oracle

For a developer to identify and disable foreign key constraints is a difficult task. A brief description on the foreign key (referential integrity) constraints will go a long way in identifying and disabling these constraints. Read on to learn more.

Finding Foreign Key Constraints in Oracle

Black Belt Administration: Performance Dashboard for Microsoft SQL Server, Part I

Black Belt Administration: Performance Dashboard for Microsoft SQL Server, Part I: "As I state in BlackBelt Components: Manage Nulls in OLAP Reports and other articles of this subseries, the Black Belt articles represent an attempt to minimize the setup required in simply getting to a point within an article where we can actually perform hands-on practice with the component(s) or method(s) under consideration. I typically accomplish this by using existing report samples or other “prefabricated” objects that either come along as part of the installation of the applications involved, or that are otherwise readily accessible to virtually any organization that has installed the related components of the Microsoft business intelligence solution. In the Black Belt Administration articles, I focus upon procedures and tools that specifically relate to the job of the Reporting Services Administrator, versus report authors and other developers, although in many real world scenarios, as most of us are aware, these roles often intersect."

Pulling the Back-Room Data Warehouse onto Center Stage with RFID

Pulling the Back-Room Data Warehouse onto Center Stage with RFID: "But how do all these pieces of the RFID-DW-BI jigsaw puzzle fit together. First, let us refresh ourselves with a few concepts on RFID and also BI/DW before we put it all together into an architectural framework."

mySQL DBA: Looking for DBA's

mySQL DBA: Looking for DBA's: "Send me your resume, and I'll hook you up with a job at Yahoo!

Specifically I'm looking for a mySQL DBA, with 64-bit Linux Experience.
If you have more sys-admin / development skills then actually DBA skills no worries, if your good I'll give you a crash course in how to tune / improve uses of mysql.


Send your inquires to

mysqldba1@yahoo.com"

Oracle Comes Clean—Sort of: TDWI

Commentary on the Hyperion purchase:

Oracle Comes Clean—Sort of: TDWI: "“Oracle does have an OLAP product, but we do see customers wanting to have this multi-source, heterogeneous system, so we’ll take good advantage of Essbase and we’ll continue as a strategy to offer OLAP functionality, and lots of BI functionality in the Oracle database,” Rodwick comments."

Geeks in Paradise | InfoWorld | How to Handle Network Growing Pains | March 14, 2007 09:35 AM | By Cynthia Kuo

A nice set of slides from the Sys Admin for Digg.

Geeks in Paradise InfoWorld How to Handle Network Growing Pains March 14, 2007 09:35 AM By Cynthia Kuo: "Ron Gorodetzky, co-founder of Revision3 and the Senior Systems Administrator at Digg, was a presenter at the Southern California Linux Expo 2007. His presentation entitled Admin++, what root never told you walks through his own personal experience helping to manage the technical-side of two start-ups and the growing pains along the way as the bandwidth, hardware, and software requirements grew. Ron recommends a lot of useful Linux tools to help you scale along the way, and his points on infrastructure, site and servers, can be used in any environment."

Mastering Enterprise BI: Time Intelligence Pt. II

Mastering Enterprise BI: Time Intelligence Pt. II: "The purpose of the Mastering Enterprise BI subset of my Introduction to MSSQL Server Analysis Services series is to focus on techniques for implementing features in Analysis Services that parallel – or outstrip - those found in the more “mature” enterprise OLAP packages. In many cases, which I try to outline in my articles at appropriate junctures, the functionality of the OLAP solutions within well-established, but expensive, packages, such as Cognos PowerPlay Transformer and Cognos PowerPlay, can be met – often exceeded – in most respects by the Analysis Services / Reporting Services combination – at a tiny fraction of the cost. "

Survey: CIOs Are Gearing Up To Hire Database Specialists

Interested in checking out the market yourself? Check the Indeed job widget on the right sidebar.

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Survey: CIOs Are Gearing Up To Hire Windows, Networking, And Database Specialists: "Also in demand are specialists in database management for Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2. "

It's The End Of The Business Intelligence World As We Know It

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: It's The End Of The Business Intelligence World As We Know It: "The once staid business intelligence market is about to explode into something very different. Oracle's deal to acquire Hyperion Solutions for $3.3 billion, disclosed March 1, is the latest in a series of developments since the beginning of the year that make such a market blowout inevitable. In January, NCR announced plans to spin off Teradata, its data warehousing division, as a standalone company. About the same time, Hewlett-Packard revealed that it has been quietly developing a data warehousing platform of its own. "

mySQL DBA: Putting mySQL 5.0.33 into production

mySQL DBA: Putting mySQL 5.0.33 into production: "Otherwise it's a straight forward upgrade for me, so far.

I have a mysql 4.0 database that was about 200GB in size, most of that data was removed yet the ibdata file is still 200GB. So, what I did was

mysqldump --single-transaction -uroot -p --all-databases --master-data=1 > all_databases.sql"

Tools, tips, and links on optimizing mysql | drupal.org

Tools, tips, and links on optimizing mysql drupal.org: "1. Get this script, upload it, unzip it, and install it in your /etc folder (at the root of your server, not your Drupal install, right). Then run it from the command line by entering sh /path-to-file/tuning-primer.sh

The script will run and what you'll be left with is an output with some info and suggestions about your MySQL settings. Was shocked to learned that on my VPS the cache was not even enabled - very helpful to know!"

BI Maturity - What level are you?

Business Intelligence Review: "How is your business intelligence (BI) investment in your company? What's the maturity of your BI architecture and processes? "

Can you solve Joe Celko's SQL puzzles?

From the book, these puzzles demonstrate the thinking processes required to solve difficult SQL problems. See if you can solve them before checking on the answers.


Can you solve Joe Celko's SQL puzzles?

Inside Second Life's Data Centers - Technology News by InformationWeek

Inside Second Life's Data Centers - Technology News by InformationWeek: "Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller said."

They are also porting to Mono - or .NET.

SimonS SQL Server Stuff - Microsoft SQL Server MVP

Interesting approach... I think this could be very valuable if done right.

SimonS SQL Server Stuff - Microsoft SQL Server MVP: "I've just posted the first of a series of webcast/demos/how tos that I will be continuing over the next few months. There are many common tasks that are much easier to show than explain, especially around SSIS and coding in general."

Partners prompt Oracle's multicore price reduction

Partners prompt Oracle's multicore price reduction: "In response to requests from some of its distribution partners, Oracle Corp. has lowered the licensing prices for some of its multicore server software to be more competitive with database rival Microsoft Corp. "

TableDiff.exe - a cool SQL Server 2005 tool

TableDiff.exe - a cool SQL Server 2005 tool: "This compares 2 tables in the same database on the same server and creates a new table called DiffsTable that holds the differences and
creates a T-SQL script file at d:\MyTable1_MyTable2_diff.sql
that holds the UPDATE/INSERT/DELETE statements to synchronize the 2 tables:"

SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 2

SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 2: "In Part 1 of this series, the first four tasks (Database Integrity, Shrink DB, Reorganize and Rebuild Index) were discussed. We’ll continue with the task Update Statistics. All of the examples in this series will act on the Microsoft SQL Server Adventure Works database."

Microsoft unlocks SQL Server 2005 license for virtualization

virtualization.info: Microsoft unlocks SQL Server 2005 license for virtualization: "In addition, Microsoft announced that it is expanding virtualization use rights to allow unlimited virtual instances on servers that are fully licensed for SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition. For customers who want maximum flexibility in their use of virtualization technology, now or in the future, SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition is the ideal choice."

Oracle to buy Hyperion in $3.3B deal

Oracle to buy Hyperion in $3.3B deal: "Oracle Corp. said today it has agreed to acquire business intelligence software vendor Hyperion Solutions Corp. for $3.3 billion in cash.
Oracle said it will combine Hyperion's software with its own business intelligence and analytics tools to offer customers a broad range of performance management capabilities, including planning, budgeting and operational analytics. "